George Freeman highlights power of anonymised NHS patient data

George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con): I congratulate the hon. Member for Leeds East (Mr Mudie) on raising this issue for a debate that I think merits a bigger attendance. I hope that the subject will be debated subsequently on the Floor of the House.

This is an important issue. We have seen in recent months and years in the House that data sit at the heart of so much of the transparency revolution that is taking place in health care, not least in the Francis report, which was indeed in part driven by a revolution in transparency, with outcomes data revealing differences in outcomes across the UK. That has highlighted that, within our precious and beloved NHS, there is huge variability in standards and outputs. The genie is out of the bottle, in terms of the public interest in the power of those data to drive both transparency on outcomes and patient empowerment—a theme that the hon. Gentleman rightly touched on.

I declare an interest in that I come to this matter after a 15-year career in biomedical science and research, in the last seven years of which I helped to create partnerships in the national health service between NHS clinician scientists, research charities, industry and university scientists to try to accelerate the process by which modern medicines are discovered and developed. My experience is that, over the past 10 years, this country has quietly come to lead in the appliance and use of anonymised cohort data sets and, indeed, specific patient data sets in particular disease areas to drive and accelerate the development of modern medicines, with extraordinary benefits for patients in the NHS.

The truth is that the traditional model of medicines development, on which we and the NHS have relied for nearly 50 years, in which the pharmaceutical industry goes away and spends hundreds of millions—or increasingly, billions—of pounds and comes back to us with a perfect drug that suits everybody, is a model that it cannot afford, and we cannot either. The more we learn about genetics and genomics, and patients and disease, the more we know that your disease, Mr Hollobone, will be different from mine: our susceptibility to it will be different, as will be our response to drugs. The revolution in research data offers an extraordinary opportunity for the NHS to be the place in the world where we develop and design 21st century medicines targeted at the patients who need them and generate extraordinary opportunities for our NHS patients and clinicians.

I want to mention an example that brings this matter to life. The last project that I worked on was here in London, at King’s college, with Professor Simon Lovestone, the head of research at King’s academic health science centre and professor of psychiatry. The project was funded by the National Institute for Health Research, an NHS body, and looked at the catchment population for the South London and Maudsley NHS mental health trust—250,000 patients suffering from a range of mental health ailments. As Members will be aware, in mental health, there is no magic bullet drug; there is a huge cocktail of some very difficult drugs, with hugely traumatic experiences for patients, who often have to change dosage. It is an unsatisfactory area of modern health care, in which we are really failing a large number of patients. The system that was put in place, funded by the NIHR, created an anonymised dataset of the 250,000 patients, which allows researchers to look across that cohort at relationships between medicines and outcomes, disease and MRI scans, and really shines a light on which drugs are working for which patients. That gives extraordinary opportunities to us here in London and in Britain to lead in the field of developing treatments for a whole range of mental health ailments, from Alzheimer’s to a range of other indicators.

The truth is that these data are utterly key to the quiet revolution in 21st century health care and medicine that we are beginning to see for three reasons. The first is research, as we have discussed. The second is accountability, as we saw in the Francis report most traumatically, but across the board. My constituents want to understand and to see that their patient journey from care is properly tracked. I have power of attorney for my mother, and last summer I wanted to be able to log on quickly to see what she had been prescribed and what her diagnosis was when she was unable to do that for herself. The younger generation particularly want and are beginning to expect to be able to use data to drive accountability.

The third and most important reason is empowerment, which the hon. Member for Leeds East touched on. We are moving from an age when health care and medicine was something that was done to us by the Government to something that we want modern 21st century citizens to take more responsibility for. Several concerns have been touched on, some of which are valid and important to discuss—

Mr David Davis: My hon. Friend is making a fabulously compelling case and I think that I agree with everything that he says except for one presumption: this is being advanced with one, all-singing, all-dancing database, instead of a set of tailored, directed ones.

George Freeman: My right hon. Friend makes an excellent point, as ever, and I was just coming to it.

The hon. Member for Leeds East raised several important points that I want to touch on. We should be clear that the data will be anonymised, and it might be worth looking at a framework to ensure that only anonymised data are released. No one is even beginning to think or talk about insurance or anything to do with insurance companies. That has not been mentioned, and it is important to say that here. That is not what the issue is about. We should all remember that it is illegal for pharma companies to contact any patient even if they have got hold of data.

On opting in and opting out, the evidence suggests that patients want their data to be used in research. The opt-in rate to the biobank project is 98%, and when patients are told that the data are not being used for research, they want to know what on earth is being done with them.

An additional point worth making concerns doctor-patient confidentiality. There are layers of data, and my right hon. Friend’s broken nose would sit quite high. More discreet information such as notes by a GP may not be appropriate for release, and we should acknowledge that we are talking about layers of data.

I will wrap up by saying that there is a huge danger in the Government’s laudable initiative to link their data sets together to drive the revolution: a clear statement of patient rights is needed. Patient data are involved, and patients should have a framework and the architecture to access them for themselves. We should encourage them to take responsibility for their outcomes, their health and their data. If we did that, I think that we would find much more public support for this important initiative, which I welcome.

George Freeman: Will the Minister confirm that the situation at the moment—that is, under the previous Care.data initiative—is more or less that GPs have patients’ records, many of which are not electronic but in paper format with treasury tags, but there is no formal link across to hospital records? Hospitals can say whether a patient has been admitted, but most of them do not have an integrated system to know what treatment a patient received in different parts of the hospital. Normally, someone pushes a wagon along the corridor with the treasury-tagged information. Also, there is no integration at the moment with the care system. The data of many of my constituents who go in and out of hospital for acute care and community care is chaotic. That makes transparency difficult, and it was one of the things at the heart of the Francis report and some of the Winterbourne View issues. We must remember that we would all gain from this public health benefit.

Dr Poulter: My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, and he is right to highlight the fact that we are talking about an evolutionary process. The health and social care information centre is not a sudden revolution. It will allow better use of information to join up care in exactly the way that he describes. It is no good having a £3.8 billion integration fund for better provision of services unless we have the right information and can joint up intelligence to understand what good care looks like.